To My Dear Students

To My Dear Students,

Two years ago, I sat on the floor behind my desk, not giving a care. The Bi-Lo had just been robbed and armed gunmen were being chased through our neighborhood. We were on lockdown, but someone decided to squirt the fire extinguisher through our trailer, causing half of you to run outside and the other half to loudly hack and cough inside the trailer while comparing death by gunshot with suffocation. Our review game was forgotten.

You came behind my desk, where I sat on the floor, determined not to react lest something break inside of me, and told me, “We’re not afraid out there, because that’s what it’s like every day where we’re from. We hear gunshots all the time. So this is our life.” You were being jaunty and distancing, but also honest. I looked at you through the haze of the fire extinguisher and thought, “Yep, your life. How the hell can I teach you? Or even keep you safe?”

A year later, we sat in a trailer on the other end of campus, taking a test. Suddenly, a piece of the ceiling crashed down, dangling by a thin scrap of metal mere centimeters from a stunned student’s face, and showering him in dead wasps and other dirt. You turned around in your seats, and watched me sprint to support the ceiling so that he could move safely. Then you turned back and continued to test. Aghast, I waited for you to start screaming or at least take your phones out and put our broken classroom online. But the next time you spoke, it was to ask me whether #26 on the test was part of Maslow’s Hierarchy.

What made the difference? Why do you sometimes choose chaos and other times scholarship? How did my top students file out of their IB exam this year and start listing the studies they’d used in the test while two paces behind them, one girl attacked another and a violent brawl broke out? How did they continue to calmly tick research studies off on their fingers without even turning around to see the blood pouring out of a girl’s jaw while behind them, students shoved to get a good view? Why did I fail to get some of you to lift a pencil and watch others emerge into dazzlingly articulate young adults?

I’ve spent the past two years puzzling over it. What unlocks your motivation? What pushes you towards success and away from failure? Teaching you reminds me of when I was a child, trying to fly. I used to jump from my dresser to my bed, over and over, for hours, emerging from my room covered in bruises. I felt like that every morning in our classroom as I jumped off the highest point I could lesson plan, trying to vanquish gravity, holding your hands and promising that if you just had enough faith, we would fly. I spent two years looking for the magic key, the incantation, the right potion, or the fortuitous combinations of perfect circumstances that would unlock your motivation and your brilliant, compassionate understanding.

But here is the truth: I, and the rest of your teachers, can be as magical as we want. We can open the door to Narnia for you, set you up with a stalwart band of fellows and drown you in fairy dust, and still, your success is not certain. Because Goethe is right:

You are the decisive element. It is your personal approach that creates the climate. It is your daily mood that makes the weather. You possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. You can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, you can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is your response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized.

Across the nation, adults are doing research on what causes success in school. Statistics will say geography, and socioeconomic status; educational academicals say good teachers and punitive evaluations; the Charlotte Observer makes it seem like whatever it is, our school can’t offer it. People will tell you that it's predetermined, a cocktail of potent genetic and environmental causes. In the trifecta of biological, sociocultural, and cognitive causes of behavior, the first two get a lot of attention. But they're not under your control. So focus on what is. Reread Harry Potter, and agree with Dumbledore-- it's your choices that determine who you really are.

Because you are the decisive element. You decide, each and every day, whether you are going to fly. My most extraordinarily delightful job the past two years was to believe in you, and yours, to prove me right. You did, and you have, and you will.